Tuesday, May 15, 2007

The Real Story of JPG Magazine

I've long been a huge fan of JPG Magazine and the idea behind it. Crowdsourcing and all of its resultant projects have always fascinated me, and JPG was an early and efficient implementation of the eager-and-willing internet community's photographic talent. Co-founders and husband-wife duo Derek Powazek and Heather Champ (who also works at Flickr), however, both recently -- and abruptly -- left the magazine. I just recently found out why. I stumbled upon each of their respective posts (Derek's; Heather's) about what catalyzed their departure, and it's a pretty depressing story.

In short, the company's entire history is being re-written (without Derek and Heather, incidentally) and the first six (stunning) issues of JPG have been taken off the site. I don't currently have the PDFs of their first two years of production, but if anyone does and would be willing to e-mail me the files, I'd like to host them off of my site for posterity's sake. Can anyone help?

In the meantime, good luck to Derek and Heather in all future endeavors. I, for one, don't think I'll be uploading any more images to my JPG account any time soon...

1 comment:

Mira
said...

I was so disgusted when I found out. I thought about deleting my account in protest, but it probably wouldn't affect anything anyway. There's a huge uproar about the Paul and the new JPG publishers on the Flickr Unofficial JPG group. Between that and the coverage on digg.com and Technorati, the story's getting a lot of attention.